S. Africa Trials Look At Role Of White Rebels

March 06, 1986|By Erik Van Ees, Special to The Tribune.

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA — Government action within the last week against three whites accused of being guerrillas in the African National Congress provides a rare look at the role of whites in the mostly black armed movement.

Eric William Pelser was the first white to refuse military service for South Africa and to opt instead to enter training with the ANC in an Angolan bush camp.

The 22-year-old university dropout received a seven-year prison term last week on a treason conviction for being a member of Umkhzho we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the ANC`s fighting arm in the drive to overthrow the white-ruled government.

Two days later, Helene Therese Judith Marie Passtoors, 44, stepped into the dock in Johannesburg`s regional magistrate`s court to hear charges of treason and terrorism leveled against her. Among the charges: alleged membership in the banned ANC.

Her trial is to start in April in the Supreme Court. If Passtoors, an international aid worker with dual Dutch-Belgian citizenship, is found guilty, she could face the death sentence.

Charged with her was a Dutch anthropologist, Klaas de Jonge, 49. He played a lesser role in her alleged five-year underground work for the ANC in South Africa. But he, too, was accused of belonging to the movement and of conspiring with Passtoors.

De Jonge did not appear in court. Shortly after his arrest last June, he broke from police custody and briefly burst into the Dutch Embassy offices in Pretoria before his police escort hauled him out.

He was inside only briefly, but that was enough to constitute a formal attempt at diplomatic asylum. After an international furor, the South African government handed De Jonge back to the Dutch Embassy, where he remains. The Dutch government refuses to return him to stand trial on political charges.

In the last two decades, six white ANC members have been arrested by police, tried and jailed for varying terms. They were predominantly couriers and did reconnaissance for the organization.

Before being arrested last June, Passtoors is alleged to have laid down an efficient network for the ANC, including the routing of weapons and establishing safe harbor out of the country for an ANC member. The full extent of her involvement will not be known until her trial.

De Jonge also set up weapons caches, one in the black township of Mamelodi, outside Pretoria, under a rusting car wreck.

There are no facts available to show if Pelser, Passtoors and De Jonge are part of a new trend that brings disenchanted whites to join the ANC. But as white conscripts have been drawn into black townships in riot-control operations as part of their compulsory army service, the anti-military ``end conscription campaign`` also has grown.

Pelser`s written statement to the court echoed similar beliefs expressed in the last two years by young men made increasingly aware of their country`s political traumas through the violence in the black townships.

Said Pelser: ``I did not want to be . . . an enforcer of the perpetuation of injustice towards legitimately aggrieved people. . . . I did not wish to be part of a force which, as far as I was concerned, was illegally occupying Namibia (South-West Africa) and engaged in destabilizing neighboring countries.``

The Johannesburg newspaper Weekly Mail said in its latest issue that the jailing of Pelser ``may well be a sign of the future, rather than an isolated event. . . . He was the first trained white member of Umkhzho we Sizwe for at least two decades to be captured, brought to trial, convicted and imprisoned. But he is unlikely to be the last.``

Outside of South Africa, white members of the ANC in exile are not uncommon, though they make up a small percentage. Only one person ranks among the top: Joe Slovo, leader of the outlawed South African Communist Party and an executive member of the ANC. Slovo masterminded armed guerrilla attacks into South Africa from neighboring Mozambique until two years ago, when the Mozambican government asked him to leave because the two countries have a nonaggression treaty.

Another white ANC member, Dennis Goldberg, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for sabotage and treason in a 1964 trial that also sent ANC leader Nelson Mandela to jail for life, last year accepted an offer of freedom from President P.W. Botha in return for rejecting violence as a political weapon.

Goldberg left Pretoria`s central prison, where he was kept apart from the black ANC leadership, and flew to London, where he resumed working for the ANC. The rebel group`s leadership forgave Goldberg for giving in while Mandela and other black ANC members refused the government`s offer.

Winnie Mandela, wife of the ANC leader, said: ``I can`t begrudge him taking the chance of personal freedom. But it is deeply tragic in our South African situation that it was the white man who accepted the offer. However, there have been so many whites who contributed to our struggle.``